I’m not entirely convinced it’s somewhere we want to head as an industry.

Is the internet about to go the way of the television channel bundle that we’ve been fighting (at least in Canada) so hard to break up? It’s not really hard to draw parallels between ISPs looking to bundle premium website access (faster bandwidth, throttling, yadda yadda) to their subscribers and television companies looking to package up sub-standard channels with premium channels in bundles. These are the grounds for the current net neutrality battle we’re all engaged in, whether we like it or not. So then, why is it okay that the New York Times and Spotify bundle their content, but someone like Comcast or AT&T can’t? Is this just the first step towards content exclusivity deals between major platforms and publishers? Want the The Washington Post? Buy an iPhone. Want to get discounted access to Verizon internet? Sign up for a Facebook account.

Slippery slope, indeed.

I’d also like to take a moment and point out that the offering is only for “new subscribers.” What does that say to all the people already paying for The New York Times digital at full cost? We’re amidst a battle to regain customer trust as an industry, and instead of delivering the new offering to its entire subscriber base, the New York Times is marginalizing loyal, already paying customers. The optics of that can’t be explained away.

Tweet Of The Week

AdTech News And Editorial

What used to be time devoted to consuming news content is increasingly overall entertainment time. Thus, today's journalists aren't solely competing with coverage from other newsrooms, but also with sports, entertainment, professional development, friends and family etc for their audience's attention.

Ad exchanges are hurting the quality of online advertising and sabotaging publisher revenue and reputation in the process. A publisher’s value is tied to its readers, who loyally return for great content and experience. Yet publishers allow exchanges to serve ads that distract from the content readers came to consume.

I have a fundamental belief; the digital advertising ecosystem needs to be blown up! A new creative standard must be developed using the entire screen. No ads should appear in content. Ads should appear, before or after action.

Like junk mail, adtech is driven by data, intrusively personal, looking for success in tiny-percentage responses, and oblivious to harms it causes, which include wanton and unwelcome surveillance, annoying the shit out of people and filling the world with crap.

Facebook is not a publisher, but rather a distribution channel. In order to responsibly check the veracity of content you need editors – and Facebook doesn’t have any. Just imagine: if Facebook were to choose what is supposedly right or wrong, or, even worse, what is good or evil, then Facebook would change from a technology platform into a media company. A kind of global superpublisher, which determines what people may read or see and what they may not. I would find this kind of power really sinister.

It’s not just platforms’ payment terms that madden publishers. It’s the sometimes erratic way the platforms (especially Facebook) change tack, so media companies that have organized themselves around one feature have to do sudden about-faces to keep up. “As they change their strategy, sometimes our teams are caught in the middle of these changes,” Kuntz said.

Header Bidding

Server side header bidding works essentially the same way as regular header bidding from the publisher perspective, there’s just less implementation work to do. A publisher still has to put some JavaScript code in their header in order to trigger a request to an exchange before their ad call, but instead of one script per partner, there’s just one script overall that’s needed.

On Tuesday, it rolled out its wrapper, Apex, which lets publishers bring in demand for their in-feed native ad placements... TripleLift will run a first-price auction among all participating partners, a shift from the OpenRTB spec of a second-price auction that could result in higher payouts for publishers.

Acquisitions

The company – which was founded in 2008, the heyday of companies seeking to tame the social fire hose – revealed Tuesday it had acquired AdEspresso, a Facebook and Instagram ads platform, for an undisclosed amount.

In addition to the above, many users have requested a way to access, copy, and share the canonical URL of a document. Today, we're adding support for this functionality in form of an anchor button in the AMP Viewer header on Google Search. This feature allows users to use their browser's native share functionality by long-tapping on the link that is displayed.